Best Practices for Marketing Leaders Launching New Products Without Opt-Ins: Cold Emails vs. HTML Campaigns

·Feb 19, 2026 11:48 AM·

Question for Marketing leaders who have launched new products successfully. When launching a new product without opt-ins - do you typically have Sales send text-based cold emails first or do you start sending out HTML campaigns even though the prospect hasn't subscribed? Or do you do both at the same time?

5 comments

· Sorted by Oldest

Marcus S.
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I would personally avoid HTML campaigns if someone hasn't opted in yet (feels like spam and can harm your email domain reputation) For cold outreach, I think best for outbound team to start with plain text emails
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Emmet F.
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I know your question was directed to marketing leaders and I'm in sales but just my 2 cents, I would second what Marcus said. If it's pure cold outreach, definitely best for outbound sales team to send plain text emails and I'd probably go one step further and do a call campaign in alignment with emails. Once that's moving and folks opt-in then you can go all-in on the HTML campaigns
Mahesh K.
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What happened to the good old lead magnet
Paris P.
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Thanks Marcus and Emmet! Makes sense but wanted to confirm
Manoj R.
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Mine might be slightly off but sharing in case it’s relevant. In our case, we launched Version 2 of our product, replacing the previous version. Version 2 does not have functionality to mass communicate with our 64,000+ user community. So we had to use the functionality in Version 1 to communicate. Version 1 has unsubscribe feature. But once the mass communication feature is built on Version 2, we will provide an unsubscribe option. However, as we did not migrate this data from Version 1 to Version 2, some of those unsubscribed would probably get upset with us. Lot more thinking needs to go in. As expected, this is one of many such issues we need to deal with.